People are vulnerable to adultery for many reasons; no one gets involved in adultery for any single reason, life is too complicated for that.
Every married person who has had an affair is driven and pulled by a legion of conflicting needs and drives.
Yet there are some things that many people have in common. I am going to mention a few of them. Taking a cue from psychology, I will take the risk of distinguishing between two categories of inner pressures: sick and healthy. This is a risk because some readers will interpret healthy to mean good and sick to mean bad. All I mean by a healthy pressure is that the People who feel it are not necessarily neurotic. I am also going to list separate inner pressures felt by men and by Women.
This is also a risk-the risk of male arrogance or ignorance. Women readers will have to Judge for themselves whether I am making sense.
Sick Pressure
1. Anger:
Anger is a hard driver. It pushes people toward any act that can punish the person toward whom their anger is directed. Unresolved anger can pressure a husband or wife into an affair with another person in order to punish a spouse for all his/her failures. The angry person is not falling in love with that third person; he is failing in anger against his spouse. A wife may feel that she is always giving, never getting. Perhaps her husband has been unfaithful, insensitive, or brutal. What better way to punish him than by getting involved with another man? A husband may feel that he is put upon always providing, always faithful, always extending himself to take care of his wife’s need while he gets little in either emotional or sexual satisfaction. What more effective way does he have to get even more than to have an affair with an attractive woman? This is a sick pressure because anger can be dealt with in a constructive way. And it is sick because it uses one person sexually in order to punish another.
2. Self Hatred:
Self depreciation is a cruel pressure toward adultery. It pushes a person to get involved with someone who will not judge him for his failures. Some people have a very low opinion of themselves: they demand too much and condemn themselves for not meeting their own impossible demands. They walk under an umbrella of shame and guilt. Moreover, they project their own self-hatred into the minds of their spouses: they believe that their spouses must be as intolerant and unforgiving of them as they are of themselves. Since they dare not reveal their blemishes within the marriage, they are pressured to look for someone who will not know them well enough to judge them, or someone whom they consider just as worthless as themselves. This is a sick pressure because selfhatred is neurotic and because it leads to a sexual relationship with someone whom the adulterer actually despises.
3. Perfectionism:
Perfectionism is an infantile pressure toward adultery. It compels people to demand the perfect situation in marriage and leaves them in a rage when they cannot find it. Every rose must blossom into exquisite beauty. Every wife must be ravishing, romantic, strong, tender, understanding, and competent.
Every husband must be a composite of impossible excellence: the rich provider, the imaginative lover, the tender helper, the sturdy pillar, and a thousand other conflicting perfections. Things as they are never seem right. Perfectionists always want more: they want the impossible in a world of imperfect people. So they seek theperfect situation in an enacted fantasy. Perfectionism is a sick pressure because it asks for more than any mere mortal can ever give.
4. Escapism:
Escapism is a cowardly pressure toward adultery. Some people suffer from chronic “too muchness”; life is always more than they can handle. It may be the children, the husband, the in-laws, the budget, or the total situation; or may be boredom, the dullness of a life withour goals, interests, or meaning. Tired of it all, the escapist simply wants to eat out from under the pressures of either too much or too little in life. He or she runs. And the most promising place to run to is into the arms of a promising lover.
Escapism as a pressure toward adultery is not a need for love or sex, but a sickly inability to deal with responsibility.
5. Deviations:
Sexual deviations make up a sad pressure toward adultery. They tempt people into adulterous situations because of shame and intolerance. A man may be ashamed of some sexual oddity or perversion he has, and a wife may be intolerant and unable to cope with her husband’s quirks. The husband does not try to cure them or explain them. Instead, he runs to someone most likely a prostitute who is not squeamish, who has seen it all before, and who therefore will accept him with his sexual oddities.